Cheney group provokes backlash

By BEN SMITH

03/02/2010 04:15 PM EST

This morning's attack on Justice Department lawyers by Liz Cheney's group Keep America Safe is provoking a bit of a backlash, including from a senior prosecutor who faced off with some of them over detainees.

"This is the typically regressive fear tactic that you expect from anybody named Cheney," said Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at the Bush era military commissions, who has been a critic of the commission system. The group, Keep America Safe, and Congressional Republicans have targeted two well-known Justice Department appointees who worked on detainee cases in the Bush years and seven more unnamed lawyers.

Neal Katyal, who Davis faced off with in the Hamdan case, "was a very talented and dedicated attorney – he ws the perfect choice for [his position as deputy Solicitor General," said Davis. "To try to impugn his character or iimply he’s part of the 'Al Qaeda Nine' or whatever is just outrageous."

"Back in the 18th century after the Boston Massacre, we provided a zealous defense [to British soldiers], and a lot of people there have the same view," he siad.

(Davis decried to the lack of change in the administration is handling terror suspects.

"It’s the same circus with the same clowns," he said.)

Liberals described the ad as McCarthyite.

“Joseph McCarthy himself couldn’t have done a better job of using fear and insinuations to smear his political enemies. Most Americans understand that McCarthyism was a shameful chapter in American history, but the Cheney wing of the Republican Party seems to have embraced Senator McCarthy’s utter lack of shame," said People For the American Way President Michael Keegan.

"This is plainly unacceptable in the United States," Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress, told my colleague Josh Gerstein this morning. "Condemnation is not sufficient. This is pure McCarthyism."

Gerstein recalls that a senior Bush Administration official who attacked detainees' lawyers in similar terms drew a high-level rebuke and was forced out.

But the Justice Department's choice right now to disclose a number, but not the name, of former detainee lawyers is a tempting target for the right.